by Rick Wayne
“What good is fear?” Vernal grumbled. “Hurry up.” Vernal grimaced as the long, slender larva pushed into his skin and squirmed into his wrist. “Ow.”
“It will secrete a numbing agent.” The old man put the tongs away. “You won’t feel it after a couple hours. You’ll also be less susceptible to pain.”
Vernal watched the skinny larva disappear as the apothecary handed him some gauze for the bleeding. Vernal took it and cocked his wrist. Sure enough, the stinger emerged through the base of his hand. He smiled. It revealed his chipped teeth.
The old man looked away. “The longer you use it, the more it will stain your palm. Hence the name, the Black Hand.”
Vernal dropped the smile and put the stinger to his companion’s throat.
The old man stopped.
“Where’s the back door?” Vernal asked.
“Don’t point that thing at me.” The old man raised his hand to move the stinger out of the way.
Vernal grabbed the old man’s head and pushed the barb to his throat. “Don’t tell me all these freebies were for old time’s sake. You’d charge for breathing the air in the store if you could. You’re trying to get me to hang around. That means they’re on their way. Is that what the junkie was for? A lookout?”
The old man stared into Vernal’s eyes. “You’re insane.”
Vernal smiled and pushed. He broke skin. A single drop of blood from the old man’s wrinkled neck gathered on the tip of the stinger. “How potent is the toxin?”
“Very.” The old man was stoic.
“You deal with the assassin cult. You must have a secret way out. Where is it?”
The old man nodded. “At the back. Under the statue of the Keeper.”
Vernal nodded. “She keeps you safe, does she?”
“Safe enough from the likes of you.”
Vernal glanced at the front door. Then he motioned to the shrine. “Open it.”
The old man shuffled to the back. He pushed the serene, smiling statue to the side, moved two lit candles, and twisted a hidden latch at the base of the shrine’s gilded frame. The paneling below opened with a click, revealing a small, laddered tunnel.
“It goes into the abandoned sewers of the old city.”
Vernal pushed the old man down, put the gauze in his teeth, and climbed down the tunnel. “Tell Pimpernel I’ll be in touch,” he mumbled.
“Vernal,” the old man sneered from the floor, one hand at his neck. “You really are The Infernal.” Tears welled in his eyes.
Vernal bore his chipped teeth in a snarl and disappeared.
The old man stood up, retrieved some gauze for himself, and put it to his neck. The tiny bit of venom that had made it into his body was already making him woozy. He sat next to the colorful dragon skull as the front door jingled. Two large men entered.
“You’re too late,” the old man sighed. “He’s already gone.”
(SIX) At the Pleasure of the Damned
Gilbert felt his skin flush and his stomach boil before he had time to return the cup to the floor, and he knew he had just drunk poison. He looked up at the three figures on the tattered brick balcony overhead. They were shrouded in black robes and each wore a tribal mask—horned, flame-tongued, and angry. The acolytes of the assassin cult were unmoved.
Gilbert gripped the pocked concrete under his hands. He looked at the little tray that had been left for him in the middle of the chamber. “I drank poison, didn’t I?”
“Thaloximine,” one of the figures answered. “Are you familiar with it?”
Gilbert nodded. “It’s a saurus tranquilizer.”
“Indeed,” replied the second.
“It merely sedates a forty-ton animal,” said the third. “It kills a man.”
Gilbert started to feel dizzy. His mind and heart began a race neither could win. He swallowed dry.
“The poison will numb your entire body, starting with your extremities.”
“Without feeling, you will lose the ability to walk.”
Gilbert couldn’t see straight. He couldn’t tell who was talking anymore. “What do I have to do?” he asked, looking up at the concrete dome overhead. The abandoned remains of Hoosegow Prison were a vine-strapped hulk. As his head throbbed, it seemed as if the dome would crash in on him.
“You may be able to reach one of the causeways before the poison takes effect.”
Gilbert looked around. Three large, oval causeways sloped down and away from the main floor, delving into pitch darkness. The engineer in him wondered if the room had been some kind of aqueduct.
“The antidote is inside this chamber.”
“You have all you need to know.”
“Your fate is in your hands.”
Gilbert’s mind split. One half was aware of his actions, and it watched helplessly as the other half circled for answers. As in a dream, he was both observer and observed, trapped in his body and free.
He stumbled to his feet, then tripped and fell. His hands took the full weight of his body against the concrete, but he felt nothing. Gilbert collapsed on the ground near the tray, which clattered and shook. He realized he’d never make it three steps let alone across the hall. He began to shake and gasp.
Had they told him everything he needed? What did he know?
Everything was a ritual with the Black Hand, a test, full of innuendo and double-meaning, like the robes and the secrecy and the poison. Nothing was as it seemed.
They didn’t say the antidote was in the causeways. They merely said it was in the room.
Gilbert lost vision.
“The antidote isn’t in any of the causeways, is it?” He panted between words.
Gilbert’s entire body was numb, and it made him feel three times larger, like a swollen insect, a juicy moth ready to burst out of the cocoon of his radiation suit.
“Your service to the Black Hand has concluded.”
One of the robed figures raised a blowgun to his mouth.
“Goodbye, Mr. Tubers.”
As the dart pierced his neck, Gilbert was certain it would pop him like a balloon.
§ § §
Gilbert awoke with a throbbing headache. He was nauseated and his muscles burned as if he’d just risen after a night of heavy drinking. He coughed and tried to move his hands, but he was handcuffed to a chair. The hood of his suit had been draped over his head again, and he stared out through the round portal with the sound of his own breath in his ears. It was dark. The air was moist and foul. The table in front of him was chipped and scratched and dotted with brown stains of old blood.
Gilbert took a deep breath, sat up, and stared into a wall of metal eyes. Heads. Mechanoid heads. Hundreds, thousands perhaps, pseudoflesh long since decayed, stacked one on top of the other in a pile three meters high. Some were tiny. A few were half as tall as he. Some were empty. Some were bleeding wires.
Behind the macabre pile, a heavy wall rose to a porticoed ceiling covered in a mural triumphantly proclaiming the achievements of the Master Race. Broad, buxom women raised fists and held banners as they stood on the corpses of the weak, the mechanoid, the aminal. In the background, a congress of white-haired, black-eyed Furies ripped their enemies to pieces, which were scattered before them.
The rest of the room was filled with the dismemberings of a rusted race. Arms, legs, torsos, hands, and some parts with no human analog had all been removed and stacked in piles, like with like.
Five arched steel doors covered the back wall. Ovens. That’s where everything organic went.
“Shit,” he cursed. It was eerie, an eternal tomb.
The sounds of his struggles broke the silence, and an elderly woman walked into Gilbert’s field of vision. He hated that the visor obscured so much. He sensed others were nearby, in the shadows. Men, perhaps.
“You’ve made a nice living for yourself.” The woman tossed a file of papers and photographs on the table. It was stamped with a black hand. “More to the point, you’ve been smart about it.”
/> “Where am I?”
The old woman sat down. She was thin and wrinkled but well kept and neatly dressed. Her faded hair rose in a bun, and she wore an off-white leather patch over her left eye crested in a multi-hued pearl. “Did you know that ‘hoosegow’ means prison? Calling it Hoosegow Prison is redundant.” Her voice was lean and cracked with age.
“I thought it was somebody’s name.”
“Most people do.”
“Is that where we are?”
“Built over two hundred years ago by the First Army of the Master Race, it became the seat of their genocide. After they were defeated, it served as the city’s municipal prison. Then it was a sanitarium. Finally, like everything else, it got old and was abandoned.”
“I see.” Gilbert didn’t know what else to say.
“I’m also old, Mr. Tubers, which means I have an unhealthy fascination with the past.”
“It looks like a dungeon.” The aqueduct had been under the main facility. Gilbert expected this was deeper still. There was enough concrete overhead to bury him safely, if that was the endgame. He tugged on the handcuffs.
“It is. This is where the Amazons tortured and dismembered most of the mechanoid race, not to mention countless other undesirables.”
Gilbert looked at the blood-splattered table. “Looks still in use.”
“My employer purchased the abandoned lot from the city after discovering this chamber. We’re almost seventy feet underground.”
“Are you going to torture me?”
The woman smiled. “All right, Mr. Tubers. Let’s get down to cases. Your contract has been purchased from the Black Hand.”
“I don’t have a contract.”
“But you have a debt.”
“My father had a debt.”
“Which fell to you.”
“It’s bullshit.”
The woman sat back. “But we haven’t been introduced. I’m Marcelline.”
Gilbert didn’t speak. She already knew his name.
“Whether you think you owed anything to the Hand or not is irrelevant. We work for the same person now.”
“And that is?”
“Not as important as your work as a political assassin.” Marcelline sifted through the photographs in the file, throwing them down one after the other. “Futuria. Atlantis. Japanamania.” She raised an eyebrow. “The Hand keeps excellent records. You’re quite the world traveler. Looks like you’ve even been inside the Aminal Kingdom. Most people are lucky to travel a hundred miles, and here you’ve been all over the world.”
“I’ve been fortunate.”
Marcelline closed the file. “Never more than twice a year and never in Freecity. That’s smart. Foreign sanctions keep you under the radar.”
“All the work here is for the criminal syndicates anyway.”
“All business handled through the Black Hand. And all monies as well, I assume.”
“It’s not as lucrative as you might think.”
Marcelline nodded. “Murder is a volume business, I’m afraid.”
“So I’ve discovered.”
“But,” she folded her hands, “you’ve eked out a living. You keep your expenses and your profile down while you work on your . . . collections.”
She stressed the ‘s.’ Plural. Gilbert swallowed. She knew. If it bothered her, she didn’t show it. That’s why they sedated him, he thought, so they had time to go through his apartment. Gilbert realized he had no idea how long he’d been out. Judging by the pain in his head and stomach, it might have been days. He tried not to think about how much he wanted to vomit.
“You have a dark secret.”
“I don’t see where that’s any of your business.”
“Believe it or not, I admire you, Mr. Tubers. You’ve had something horrible happen to you. Most people would have given up years ago, but you turned it to your advantage. That takes hard work, guts. So let’s be forthright with each other. You’re in a pickle. Your unique talents have caught the interest of someone very powerful. And whether you believe yet or not, what you wanted, dreamed about, hoped for when you woke this morning has all gone away.” She fluttered a hand into the air. “This is the day from which you will mark the rest of your life. However long that is.”
Gilbert looked at the blood stains.
Marcelline saw it and leaned forward. “I appreciate that a man in your position isn’t afraid of death. Unlike most people, you’re faced with your mortality every day. I think you’re more afraid of what I think of you than you are of dying. Like most little boys of unusual intelligence, you were not socialized well, and so you struggle with people. That’s why it was so easy for you to cut them from your life. And the rest.”
She reminded Gilbert of the harlequin razorback. It was among the most intelligent of fairies. Its body was covered in dots of adaptive pigmentation that it could change individually from white to red to black. It was flightless but notoriously elusive. It blended into the leaf litter where it stalked insects. And a harlequin never showed its true colors.
“Your collections, both of them, along with all of your notes and research and equipment, your clothes and toys and the pictures of your father, have all been removed from your apartment.”
Gilbert felt his skin flush. She didn’t appear to be lying. He took a deep breath and tried to keep his heart rate down. His stomach boiled.
“Our employer now has everything of value to you that exists in the world.” She let that sink in. “You’re smart, and a survivor. Do as you’re told, and you’ll get it all back.”
Gilbert doubted that. “When?”
“Soon. But try to run, talk to anyone, or make things difficult, and you’ll find out that, as bad as things may seem, your life can get much, much worse.”
Gilbert looked at the piles of death, and beyond that, the mural on the wall. Proud Amazons hung over Marcelline’s inquisitive eye. Her head was framed in the slaughter of innocents. He nodded in understanding. “But can you untie me now? I’m going to throw up.”
“Fine.” Marcelline stood. “Then I’ll introduce you to someone you’re going to kill.”
(SEVEN) A Cackle of Murderlings
Erasmus stuck Zen-ji at the top of the grand staircase for good reason. A ten-foot samurai in full armor, meditating cross-legged on a large dais: that sent a clear message—that, and the man-sized sword that lay in front of him.
Jack had never seen Zen-ji speak, and in all his comings and goings through the years, Jack never saw him turn his head, or cough, or go to the bathroom. But Jack had seen him move, three times in fact.
The first had been for Johnny Two-Brain, so named because of some fantastically poor decisions he’d made with his penis, the last of which was to screw Jenny Diamond, whom Erasmus was sweet on. Not that anyone knew. Zen-ji separated the two brains, along with the right and left halves of Johnny’s body, in what had to be the fastest surgical transection in history.
Jack and Johnny had come up together, back in the cowboy days when Freecity was a lot smaller and the Empire a lot further away and everything was up for grabs. They weren’t friends, but they were friendly. Still, all Jack could think about as he watched the two halves of Johnny’s surprised face fall in opposite directions to the floor was how sharp that massive sword must be, and how strong its wielder, to make a cut like that.
Jack technically didn’t see Zen-ji’s second move. The lights were out. But he saw Mortimer Pendergast sitting in a high-backed chair in the boss’s office, smiling at Erasmus. Morty ran the Dark Red, Erasmus’s secret of secrets: an underage brothel, mostly teenage boys from the streets or local orphanages that Pimpernel patronized through his various philanthropic organizations.
The boss had caught Morty fronting on the side, but Morty wasn’t pimping. He was extorting. He had been blackmailing a famous artist who frequented the club. Morty had pictures of her in bed with two and three teenage boys at a time. She was famous and married and in good with the Imperial crowd. She w
as only too happy to produce high quality forgeries of some of the lost greats. Her crown jewel was a replica of Waldorff’s Seventh View of the Falls from the Great Sewer, which Morty sold to an aminal collector for a few hundred thousand.
Morty claimed he had inherited the art collection from his great uncle, who had been a rogue cartographer and frontier trader back before the Empire shut the border. But Erasmus was the king of liars, and he wasn’t having any of it. He pretended to laugh at Morty’s ingenuity, and Morty knew it. He must have had a hunch what was coming because, even as he laughed at the absurdity of it all, the carpet under his seat grew dark with his own urine.
The two were yukking it up good when Erasmus switched out the lights. Jack heard the sound of movement through air and the crack of wood. When the lights came back on, it looked like someone had shoved a log through Morty’s chest. There was a foot-wide hole in the back of the big chair. Zen-ji had focused on the man’s heartbeat in the dark and had speared him clean through, furniture and all.
The third move came on a rare occasion when the samurai’s dais was inside Erasmus’s office. The boss had wanted to get a picture of the Doutee Gang—Chester and his cousins—who’d come over from the other side. They’d been running some two-bit protection gigs out in the hills surrounding the city. Stupid hicks milking poor dairy farmers. Erasmus had them line up in front of an old beast of a camera, tripod-mounted like a machine gun. Of course Erasmus fucked with them first, moving them around, changing their order, asking one person to sit, one to stand, and finally all to stand in a row, some on boxes to even their heights “for the picture.” And all the while their faces were beaming, drinks in hand. “Fancy liquor,” they said. They probably drank moonshine.
It was a test. Erasmus wanted to challenge the samurai, to see if Zen-ji was faster than the camera. And it was a daredevil’s gambit. Five heads in one blow. One of them rolled near Jack’s feet. “Fancy-drinks” Chester was so tense for the picture, his body stood headless for two minutes, clutching that highball like it was the last he’d ever have. Jack stood in the corner as the rest of the crew bet on how long it would take to fall.
